Some things that we now take for granted would have been considered absurd if they were spoken about in the past. How long ago were these ideas absolutely unthinkable?

• Shop at thousands of stores all over the world while sitting at home


• Listen to music performed by any of thousands of living and dead musicians and be able to take all of this with you in your pocket.


• Talk to people anywhere in the world - immediately and at no cost.


• Have a library of millions of documents and billions of pages available in your home at no cost.


• Watch news or sports from around the world at the time it is happening.


• Choose from thousands of television and radio stations to watch or listen to.

The range of goods and services continues to rapidly increase at the same time that costs are decreasing. This has even reached the point where over the last several years there has been an increasing number of things that are available at no cost on the internet and world wide web.

Have you ever wondered why this was happening?

Who are the people or companies that are giving away free stuff?

How can they continue to do it? What is the "catch"?

Can this trend be applied to areas outside of the web so that more things are free and abundant?

What changes will we see in people and society as this trend towards free abundance continues? How will it change peoples' lives?

Is it possible to achieve success by giving away a product rather than selling it?

A few examples of success using the strategy of giving away free services are:

• Wikipedia began in 2001 and is created and maintained by volunteers. It has about 7.5 million articles in 253 languages with almost 2 million articles in English. It is the largest, most extensive, and fastest growing encyclopedia ever compiled and currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.


• YouTube is a free video sharing website that began in February 2005 and was sold to Google in November of 2006 for approximately $1,650,000,000.


• MySpace is a free popular social networking site that was created in August 2003. It has over 100,000,000 user accounts and about 230,000 new accounts are added each day. It was sold in July 2005 for $580,000,000.


• Google offers free searches, maps and many other free services. It was incorporated in 1998 and currently has a stock market valuation of approximately $125,000,000,000.